Product Reviews

Aladdin Systems has a reputation for producing extremely useful, often indispensible software utilities. Sadly, Spring Cleaning 2.0 doesn't live up to the standards set by Shrink Wrap and the StuffIt family.

It promises to clean up your hard disk in a number of different ways: MacUninstaller looks for all files associated with a particular application; Orphaned Prefs Remover searches your system for rogue preference files; and Help Remover disposes of unwanted Readme files and Help Engines. Also included are Fat App Slimmer, Alias Fixer, Orphan Adopter, Font Remover and Empty Folder Remover. Having found the appropriate files with these searches, you can then perform a number of actions on them, including 'Move to trash' and 'Launch with application'.

Version 2.0 of Spring Cleaning was released in response to specific complaints about its predecessor. For example, Font

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Remover no longer restricts its search to the System Folder, and Alias Fixer can be set to ignore the contents of the Recent Documents folder. Version 2.0 also includes some new searches - Document Finder, which looks for documents of the same type, and Duplicates Remover, as well as StuffIt archiving capabilities, custom storage folders for items you may not want to delete, and a new, more intuitive, OS 8-friendly interface.

At least that's what the press release says. In reality, many of the searches have little practical use. Duplicates Remover takes forever to complete and frequently runs out of memory. The storage folders are as hard to find as the original items - so much so that Spring Cleaning even includes a separate search for storage folders.

Being able to move items to StuffIt archives is a nice idea, but StuffIt Lite or even DropStuff gives much more versatility. Alias Fixer and Font Remover both ignore the possibility that if you're searching on more than one volume, you're likely to have more than one System Folder. However, this needn't be a major problem, as items can easily be excluded from future searches.

Spring Cleaning is basically a glorified search engine which is neither intelligent nor versatile enough to challenge Norton's Fast Find or even Apple's Find File. Most of its useful features are available as shareware or freeware, and if you really care about keeping your hard disk tidy, you're better off doing it by hand.